i'm on top of it...

wow, babysitting is hard work. i mean, i love kids - i really do, but after babysitting i realize how unready i am to be a parent. watching them for a few hours is chill, but wow, i have a lot of respect for people who actually take care of their children - it's a full-time job and then some. or maybe i just freak out too much because the kids that i'm watching aren't mine - you know? it's that whole thing where you feel much more comfortable with the responsibility of something that's yours? whereas if something happens while you're responsible for someone else's precious cargo, you get slaughtered?... yeah.

so today, one of the children that i am watching comes running into the house after having been playing with the neighbor's children - blood covering his chin and he's screaming for me. i panic. oh, oooooh man... what do i do? this child is covered with blood... and are you ready for the kicker? yeah, it's just a lost tooth. i almost had a heart attack for a lost tooth. hey, at least the good 'ole ticker got a nice jump start today, huh? 10,000 volts of electric shock is more like it. the glass isn't just half full, it's bloody overflowing....

and now, for the daily nugget: the heart of an adult beats about 70 to 80 beats per minute, 100,000 times every day, 40 million times a year and in 70 years it will have beaten 2½ billion times. aq female heart beats about 10 times per minute faster than a male’s. the rate can increase to as much as 200 beats per minute during heavy exercise. as a pump, it produces enough pressure to shoot a stream 30 feet, produce enough energy in an hour to lift 2000 lb. 3 feet off the ground, and efficiently circulate 50 million gallons over the average lifetime. in one year, the average human heart circulates from 770,000 to 1.6 million gallons of blood through the body. this is enough fluid to fill 200 tank cars, each with a capacity of 8,000 gallons. there are enough tiny blood vessels called capillaries that if placed end to end they would stretch over 2 times around the earth. all this is done with just over a gallon of blood which circulates 1,000 times in a single day through the body on a daily 60,000-mile journey, 168,000,000 miles in a lifetime. 25 trillion cells travel through the bloodstream, but a stack of 500 would only measure 0.04 inches high. the human heart rests between beats. in an average lifetime of 70 years, the total resting time is estimated to be about 40 years.

i wonder how much one's heartbeat increases when one is nearly scared to death?...